Judge Susanne Cole

In the final chapter of a years-long fight, an appeals court has ordered a NSW prefab home builder to pay almost $500,000 in damages after finding it engaging in misleading and deceptive conduct to convince a couple to vary their contract to allow the use of cladding they had previously rejected.

A court has found a NSW prefab home builder that convinced a couple to vary their contract to allow different cladding which did not have the same aesthetic effect as their preferred one engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct.

A former Turner Freeman client is seeking to appeal a District Court decision summarily dismissing his professional negligence case against the firm and a silk over a dispute with an owners corporation. 

Property developer Mirvac has won a $220,000 dispute against designer outlet store Estro over unpaid licence fees and charges under a commercial lease for a store at Sydney’s Birkenhead Point.

The Council for the Law Society of NSW can seek disciplinary findings against a solicitor who was previously banned over social media posts encouraging people to flout COVID-19 mandates and representing that a judge condoned rape and murder.

Requests by litigants for judges to disqualify themselves from presiding over cases were largely denied last year, in a raft of decisions containing lessons for litigants weighing up their own recusal bids in 2023.

A judge has refused to recuse herself from hearing disciplinary proceedings brought against a barrister over complaints that she used “judicially inappropriate words” at an interlocutory hearing.